Google announced on Dec. 1 that it had added a new region tag to top-level domains where a website’s location could not be discerned by a title tag or snippet and where the country code isn’t a clue. In other words, for .com, .net and .org TLDs.

Why would Google do that? Obviously, it’s because things can get confusing if you are looking for a specific result and you know where an organization is located, but you don’t know its URL. You perform your search and the results do not give you the clues you need to find what you want. Google’s example can be found on the official Webmaster Central Blog.

I think this is going to be a helpful tag and if you want to give away your location to help searchers find you more easily, all you need to do is log in to Webmaster Tools, click on Site Configuration – Settings – Geographic Target. Choose a country or region to associate with your site and your region tag will appear when appropriate.

My only concern with this is will you get pigeonholed into that region? Will, at some point, Google decide to show your website only to people searching from that region or will your site still be available globally? I hope the latter. I’d hate to see people’s businesses fall off because a search engine decided that because you are located in South Africa your site should only be seen by South Africans. That would be bad of that business conducted business throughout the world.

SEO tools are a dime a dozen. They are also essential for your success online. If you want to develop a successful SEO campaign then you need to take a look at the tools that you are using and make the best use of them.

One of the best free tools online is Yahoo! Site Explorer. It’s a simple tool really, but it is powerful when used correctly.

The obvious benefit to using Yahoo! Site Explorer is the ability to list your websites and check your inbound links. There are a few other free tools that do this so well, such as Google Webmaster Tools, which I highly recommend as well. The drawback (and benefit) to the Yahoo Site Explorer backlink tool is that it lists all the internal links from your own site as well as inbound links from other sites. You want good internal links, of course, but if the majority of your inbound links are links from your own site then you need to do some additional relevant link building (which should be on going and natural anyway).

But don’t just check the inbound links for your own site. Yahoo! Site Explorer also allows you to check the links of the sites that link to you. You should definitely do this. By looking at the links pointing to the sites linking to you, you have the ability to see what authority those sites are passing on to you. You can also follow those links to see if the sites are linking to you too. This is actually a good way to find new places that might be a potential way to market your company, website and to get a highly relevant link that will produce visitors.

Finally, Yahoo! Site Explorer can be used for competitive research. You can enter an URL of a domain you don’t own and check the links for it as well. Highly recommended. By knowing who is linking to you and who is linking to the sites that are linking to you, you get a full mental picture of your link portfolio and the authority that your links are passing on to you. Yahoo! Site Explorer is very good for that, so be prepared to spend some time!

New webmasters might be confused about the difference between visitors and unique visitors in your analytics program. If you’re not sure which metric is the more important of the two then perhaps you need to spend a little more time analyzing your traffic. Your Visitor count is the total number of visitors in the reporting period you are observing. Unique visitors is the number of visitors who have visited your site for the first time. Which is the more important metric for your site depends a lot on your site’s mission and your goals, but for most website owners, both metrics tell a story. Total visitor count is an important metric because it tells you precisely how many people who have been on your website. That’s important for determining your conversion rate. 1,000 visitors resulting in 100 sales equals a 10% conversion rate. You can build from that.

Unique visitors are important too, however. Most visitors will not purchase on the first visit. If you have a high unique visitor count relative to your total visitors then that means you are not getting many repeat visitors. That could be a telling sign that your content is not compelling enough. It could also mean that you are losing opportunities to convert traffic and close sales. Maybe your calls to action need work or you are losing visitors somewhere else within your sales pitch. Whatever the case, a high unique visitor count relative to your total visitor count means that most of your site visitors are not returning.

Measuring traffic is not all about raw numbers. It’s about reaching the right target market. And if you have a high unique visitor count relative to your total visitor count, it could be because you are not reaching the right target market. Maybe you need to target other keywords as part or your search engine optimization efforts or create better, stickier content to engage your visitors better to keep them coming back to your website.

Hopefully this will give you some helpful tips into the relationship between your total visitors and unique visitors. Knowing how to analyze your traffic numbers can go a long way to knowing how to solve your online problems and can help you craft a long term strategy for future success.

Some of the best things in life are free. Google Analytics is one of them…Google Analytics is one of the easiest tools to implement when it comes to ensuring that you are able to track your website statistics and have a working intelligence of your search engine optimization and search engine marketing efforts. You just set up an account and add the code provided to you to the footer of your website pages. Then you are able to view your statistics at a glance. There are elements that are perfect for the novice and expert users alike.

Here is a very helpful video about how to use Google Analytics:

To sign up for a Google Analytics account, migrate over to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and click the link on the right of the screen that reads “Sign Up Now”. You’ll see it just under the blue button labeled Access Analytics. You’ll receive an e-mail with a confirmation link. Click that link and sign into your Google Analytics account.

You should see a button that says “Get Started”. Click it and Google Analytics will walk you through the steps to set up your website for tracking. When you get the tracking code, simply insert it onto your web pages in the footer, before the closing body tag. You’ll have to do this for every page of your website. Google Analytics will not track the stats for any page that does not have this code.

It will take about 24 hours before you can view your statistics after including the code on your website. Once you do, you can use that information to better market yourself and make intelligent decisions about how you run your business and your website.

If you use Google Analytics, which is perhaps the best free analytics tool online, then you should know that the Google team behind it has added new features. These features are designed to help power users make the most of the analytics tool and to make the tool more flexible. I think Google succeeds on this one.

Here’s a run down of the new features:

• Two new goal types and expansion of the number of goals allowed
• Expanded mobile reporting
• Advanced Table Filtering
• Unique Visitor Metric for custom reports
• Multiple custom variables
• Sharing and custom reports expansion features
• Analytics Intelligence
• Custom Alerts

The video below contains the new Google Analytics features:

While all of these features are great new features for someone, I think two of the most robust off these features are the last two (Analytics Intelligence and Custom Alerts). You can set up GA to alert you weekly or monthly when certain important metrics occur on your site and Google Analytics will keep an eye on key metrics and notify you when important milestones are reached based on a programmed algorithm. Google Intelligence looks to be quite promising to all webmasters and I can’t wait to see it in action.

Learn more about these changes to Google Analytics on the GA blog.

Base64 code derives its name from the fact that it uses only 64 characters. MIME-based (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions), Base64 uses only A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and the “+” and “/” symbols. That’s 64 characters, hence the name.

In and of itself, Base64 is not bad. It has its practical uses. One of its widest applications is in embedding binary files such as images within scripts. This allows a coder to include the photo on the page rather than in an external file. It is also used to store passwords for encryption.

The problem with Base64 encoding is its strengths are also its weaknesses. Because it is useful in obfuscating passwords and embedding binary files within scripts, it is easy for spammers and malware distributors to use as well. In fact, this is often precisely what they do. And they do from within your WordPress themes. Some WordPress developers have figured out that they can use Base64 to embed a delayed script within the footer of your WordPress theme that is activated once so many downloads of that theme have been distributed. Then, you have a malware problem.

Other theme developers sell links that are placed within WordPress theme footers. You can’t see them because they stored inside a Base64 encoding string. It looks like one link to the naked eye, but in reality it could be linking to half a dozen or more websites. Even if those sites are all good and pose no threats, it’s still not something you want to do, right?

Well, there is a solution to this problem. You can download the Theme Authenticity Checker for WordPress and detect these Base64 strings that link to sites you do not want to endorse. You can then either delete those links from your blog’s footer or find a new theme. Either way, you rid yourself of unwanted Base64 code.

When it comes to getting hacked, you might think that the guys who did that to you are real bad people. Not necessarily. It could be your pharmacist or the good looking guy next door. You know, the one who took you to dinner last weekend at the five star restaurant? You didn’t know he was a computer genius, did you?

Well, he may not be. He could just have enough money to pay the real genius to hack your website and divert your traffic to his online vialis candy machine.

Let’s face it. You don’t know who the people are that are hacking your website. They could be some terrorist cell in Albania, some family in Russia trying to keep food on the table, or the taxi driver who makes his second income from selling malware and spam fighting software by hacking websites. He could be the friendliest guy in your neighborhood.

Whoever it is, though, needs to be stopped and the best way to stop them from hacking your site is to increase your level of security. Make sure your blog passwords, CMS passwords, and web host logins are super difficult to guess. Make sure your passwords are at least 8 characters with two of those characters being capital letters, at least two being numerals, and two being special characters. Those kinds of passwords are difficult to guess. Single word passwords are easy.

Learn something about web security and make sure that you password protect sensitive folders on your website. Also, don’t allow anyone the ability to write to your files on your server. Set your server settings to “read” and don’t allow your software to change them except in rare cases. Ask your network administrator before changing those. Keep your security tight and hackers will have a harder time getting in, even if their friendly and buy you a cup of coffee.

If you’ve noticed a recent drop in your search engine rankings you may or may not have a cause for alarm. It’s important to understand that frequent fluctuations in the search engine results occurs. You’ll rise and fall like the tide. However, large drops that are sudden could be caused by a number of things – not all of them within your control.

One reason you could have dropped in the search engine rankings is your site was hacked and you are beginning to see keywords that are not related to your niche appear in your site content. That’s not good. You want to remove those as soon as possible.

Many times, when this happens to a website the hacker is inserting links back to his or her site. If that site contains malware then that might cause your site to lose rankings. You could also get flagged as a malware site yourself, in which case Google will block your page from being accessed by searchers. But you want to catch it before that happens.

If you suspect that your site was hacked then log in to your Webmaster Tools account and click on the link for the website that has your concern. Click on the Diagnostics link on the left side of the page. You are looking for any kind of notification that your site has been flagged for malware. Also check your links and crawl errors. If Google is having problem crawling your website for any reason that could be why you’ve seen a fall in rankings. Next, check your sitemap and robots.txt files. If anything isn’t right then fix it immediately.

Some people spend most of their time fretting over scrapers and scheming up new ways to make their world hurt. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that it’s a waste of time to even worry about them. Matt Cutts agrees. But he also goes one step further and tells you how to benefit from scrapers.

I’ll save you the trouble of having to watch the video and just let the cat out of the bag. Put links in your content back to your site and if the scraper fails to deactivate them then you’ve got back links. They could boost your search engine optimization efforts.

That’s actually a pretty good idea. If you do article marketing then you’re likely using a resource box. Why not add a resource box at the end of your blog posts? You can do that with a plugin called DDAddSig. This plugin may not have been updated for the latest version of WordPress so test it first. There are other WordPress signature plugins so shop around.

Back to the scrapers …. I wouldn’t lose sleep over scraped content. Most of the time, the scrapers don’t rank for the content they are swiping. But if you do find one that outranks you for your own content, report them for a DMCA violation or fill out a spam report. Keep trucking. You’ve got better things to do.

According to the Google Analytics Blog, the most requested feature of Google Analytics is event tracking. If this is something that you’ve been looking forward to then throw a celebration party. It’s here.

Among the things you can track with event tracking are:

• How many times a white paper is downloaded
• How long it takes to load a video
• How many validation errors users get when filling out a form

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The Google Analytics API is the culprit, allowing third-party sources to use GA for tracking, which means that if you have an open source application that is tracking specific data on your website then you can plug in the Google Analytics API and expand your tracking for that application. I like this. It’s a good thing for webmasters. It’s a good thing for all of us.